If you're a young (or youngish) music fan looking to become a little bit more engaged with classical music, there is truly no better time than right now, particularly if you'll find yourself in Portland this weekend.

First, some broader cultural context. The sort of jagged, suspenseful classical music that particularly grabs the attention of younger listeners is having a moment. As with most musical trends, you can point the beginning of it to Radiohead. In late 2007, the band's guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, provided what may have been the most innovative and effective film score of the last decade to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Since then, Arcade Fire violinist Owen Pallett has received overwhelming acclaim in pop circles for his new album Heartland (Domino), which was recorded with the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra. Heck, I just got an e-mail about innovative Haitian-American composer Daniel-Bernard Roumain playing in Rockland on March 7 — he performed with Lady Gaga on American Idol last year.

Enter Brooklyn Rider. This New York string quartet (of two violins, a viola, and a cello, and an average age in the low-30s) will begin a weekend in Maine with a short early-evening concert performed at a decidedly unlikely venue: the deli at Hannaford on Forest Avenue. (They follow that free, 6 pm event with more formal, ticketed gigs at USM's Hannaford Hall in Portland on Saturday night, and at UMaine's Collins Center for the Arts in Orono on Sunday afternoon.)

Like their better-known brethren in Kronos Quartet (who made a name for themselves among young audiences via the score for Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film, Requiem for a Dream), Brooklyn Rider are renowned for their exhilarating performances of new and canonical string works, but also devote ample time to exploring ways to integrate music from other cultures and genres into the Western classical tradition. The last album they put out before their brand-new effort, Dominant Curve (In a Circle), was Silent City (World Village), a collaboration with the Iranian legend Kayhan Kalhor, who plays the kamancheh (an upright, four-stringed fiddle). All four members of Brooklyn Rider are also part of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, which shows the musical connections between the cultures that intersected along the trade route to China.

That intention dovetails nicely with the group's own technique. Dominant Curve is centered around Claude Debussy's lone work for string quartet, from 1893, but it also contains ambient passages and Eastern and Middle Eastern influences. "One of the reasons Debussy was inspirational for this recording," violist Nicholas Cords said in an e-mail discussion, "was because of his relationship to tradition. His pioneering visions involved looking both into the future and looking into the past. He was a very inclusive listener — he put all kinds of music on an equal plane, whether it was acknowledging the complexities of the Indonesian gamelan or taking joy in the florid lines of [Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da] Palestrina . . . [His music] speaks to the sort of directness in communication that we love to seek with our audiences."

Ye gods! Much beautiful music turns up in the 18th-century operatic form that’s probably most alien to a modern audience.

Review: Against Me! at Port City Music Hall My sophomore year in college I met a girl named Erin. She had bleached blonde spiky hair, tattoos, and a lip ring. She had spent the previous year hitchhiking around the country and while I was attending outdoor arena concerts, she was at basement punk shows.

Blythe spirit Leaving the Cutler Majestic after the opening night of Opera Boston’s latest Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein , you could see the smiling faces of an audience that had had a good time.

Open spaces In my review of the memorable Brahms performances Sir Simon Rattle led with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the Celebrity Series of Boston last month, I should have mentioned that one decision responsible for the beauty and spaciousness of the orchestral sound was the placement of the first and second violin sections on opposite sides of the stage.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Group hug Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish.

Local luminaries’ picks I asked a bunch of people who really dig local music to help me make sure I wasn’t leaving any songs out when I was developing my list of the best 10 songs of the 2000s, but then I quickly realized that “best” is about as subjective as things come when you’re talking about songs.

TEN YEARS, A WAVE | September 26, 2014 As the festival has evolved, examples of Fowlie’s preferred breed of film—once a small niche of the documentary universe—have become a lot more common, a lot more variegated, and a lot more accomplished.

GIRLS (AND BOYS) ON FILM | July 11, 2014 The Maine International Film Festival, now in its 17th year in Waterville, remains one of the region’s more ambitious cultural institutions, less bound by a singular ambition than a desire to convey the breadth and depth of cinema’s past and present. (This, and a healthy dose of music and human-interest documentaries.) On that account, MIFF ’14 is an impressive achievement, offering area filmgoers its best program in years. With so much to survey, let’s make haste with the recommendations. (Particularly emphatic suggestions are marked in bold print.)

AMERICAN VALUES | June 11, 2014 The Immigrant seamlessly folds elements of New York history and the American promise into a story about the varieties of captivity and loyalty.

CHARACTER IS POLITICAL | April 10, 2014 Kelly Reichardt, one of the most admired and resourceful voices in American independent cinema, appears at the Portland Museum of Art Friday night to participate in a weekend-long retrospective of her three most recent films.

LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX | April 09, 2014 Throughout its two volumes and four hours of explicit sexuality, masochism, philosophical debate, and self-analysis, Nymphomaniac remains the steadfast vision of a director talking to himself, and assuming you’ll be interested enough in him to listen and pay close attention.